On a hot summer afternoon in 1972, three white teenagers drove into a poor black neighborhood in Washington, D.C., forever altering six lives. Thirty-five years after that harrowing day, one survivor tries to connect to another, to make amends; but a third survivor is now out of prison, looking for a payback. This 15th novel from Daedalus favorite author George Pelecanos, following The Night Gardener, journeys from the rock-and-soul streets of the 70s to today's rapidly changing neighborhoods, from the diners and auto garages of downtown D.C. to the corridors of Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital, where the wounded men and women now come from war in the Middle East.

"Pelecanos does what few, if any, American writers do: He tells the truth. Twain told the truth; Faulkner toyed with the truth; Hemingway told his version of the truth, and Chandler certainly told a cold, cynical truth. Pelecanos's truth is from deep in the heart, from places where red blood cells know more than all the sweet, heady words truth usually hides behind."—Chicago Sun-Times

"Pelecanos has written again and again of the sense of inevitability that pervades so much inner-city violence: lives running on collision courses, individuals powerless to jump the tracks that poverty, prejudice, and ignorance have set them on. But this time he tells a different story. After starting more lives racing toward one another on those same tracks, he asks, What if we could change course? What if we could reroute our lives? It's a daring premise, one fraught with the temptations of sentimentality and false hope, but Pelecanos tells this story of tentative reconciliation with the same unrelenting realism and concern for the roundness of his characters that have characterized the bleakest of his novels. Yes, Pelecanos is among our very best crime novelists, but he may become even more renowned for writing fiction about working-class America that is both beyond crime and beyond ideology."—Booklist (starred review)